Come for the Ride!

Although most startup entrepreneurs are dedicated, motivated, and hard working – sometimes things just don’t get done.  It’s not your fault really… You are already wearing more hats than most people are willing to and when you have to do 5 or 6 jobs as one person, it can easily get distracting.

While many entrepreneurs prefer to skip to the beat of their own tunes, the best way to stay on track is to make sure you have a destination and a pre-defined track to get there.

Marathon training is a great example of breaking up a large task into short term, measurable goals and forcing yourself to push forward based on a set schedule.  Since most people don’t have the agility to run 26+ miles without some intense training, breaking the task up into smaller, managable chunks forces you to do what matters and ignore the fluff.

Earlier this year, we decided we needed to get the website out there sooner than later so we set a date for launch and stuck to it. Even days right before the launch, we were still not ready and many items were still broken but when launch day came, we put together what worked and threw it out there.  Our reasoning was once the website is public, we would have to start developing against a public time line whereas if we hid in pre-launch mode, then no one would be pushing us to go forward.  In the end, it worked out really well.  By having the website out there, we were approached by many potential partners and we knew we had done the right thing.

So what’s next?

Now that the website is launched, our next steps are to set measurable growth goals and put it against a time line.  For us, this means setting short term traffic and registration goals for 2009 and 2010 and working from the top down to figure out what we need to do each month to hit those numbers.  Again, we are hoping the goals will help us push out the fluff and help us focus our spending and efforts on what will get us to our milestones.  The alternative would be to sit around and hope that people find us by ???? then PROFIT!

With that said, do you have short term goals for your company for development or traffic – one that’s placed against a time line?  If so, what are some of the things you’re looking to achieve?

Related posts:

1. 2009 Goals for EasyAutoSales
2. Launch Quick, Change Often
3. No Place for a Perfectionist in a Web Startup
4. New Serving the EasyAutoSales.com Beta
5. Marketing Result 03: StumbleUpon